Iah Final

He hated his family because he knew they were suffering andthat he was powerless to help them. He knew that the moment he allowed himselfto feel to its fullness how they lived, the shame and misery of their lives, hewould be swept out of himself with fear and despair…He knew that the moment heallowed what his life mean to enter his consciousness, he would either killhimself or someone else. So he denied himself and acted tough.”

Native Son, Richard Wright

“She would be bound to him by ties deeper than marriage. Shewould be his”

Native Son

“He held his face a few inches from hers. He had to bind her tohim.”

Native Son

“There were two Bessies: one a body that he had just had and wantedbadly again; the other was in Bessie’s face; it asked questions; itbargained…he wished he could clench his fist and swing his arm and blot out,kill, sweep away the Bessie on Bessie’s face and leave the other, helpless andyielding before him”

Native Son

“she had told him over andover again that she lived their lives when she was workingin their homes, not her own…”

native son

“They’ll…They’ll say youraped her.”

Native Son

“Had he raped her? Yes, he had raped her. Every time he feltas he had felt that night, he raped. But rape was not what one did to women.Rape was what one felt when one’s back was against the wall and one had tostrike out, whether one wanted to or not, to keep the pack from killing one…Butit was rape when he cried out in hate deep in his heart as he felt the strainof living every day. That, too, was rape.” (227-228)

Native Son

“He wished he had the power to say what he had done withoutfear of being arrested; he wished that he could be an idea in their minds;that his black face and the image of his smothering Mary and cutting offer herhead and burning her could hover before their eyes as a terrible picture ofreality which they could see and feel and yet not destroy.” (130)

Native Son

“It maddened him to think that he did not have a wider choice ofaction…They were pasting a huge colored poster to a signboard. The postershowed a white face. ‘That’s Buckley!’ He spoke softly to himself. ‘He’srunning for State’s Attorney again.’…The white face was fleshy but stern; onehand was uplifted and its index finger pointed straight out into the street ofeach passer-by.

“The papers ought to be full of him now. It did not seem strange thatthey should be, for all his life he had felt that things had been happening tohim that should have gone into them. But only after he had acted upon hisfeelings which he had had for years would the paper carry the story, his story.

Native Son

“Though he could not have put it into words, he felt thatnot only had they resolved to put him to death, but that they were determinedto make his death more than a mere punishment; that they regarded him as afigment of that black world which they feared and were anxious to keep undercontrol. The atmosphere of the crowd told him that they were going to use hisdeath as a bloody symbol of fear to wave before the white world.” (276)

Native Son

“They were bringing Bessie’s body in now to make the white men and womenfeel that nothing short of a quick blotting out of his life with make the citysafe again…Though he had killed a black girl and a white girl, he knew that itwould be for the death of the white girl that he would be punished. The blackgirl was merely ‘evidence’…

Native Son

“If you had not dragged the name of the Communist Party intothis murder, I’d not be here…If I can make the people of this countryunderstand why this boy acted like he did, I’ll be doing more than defendinghim.” (292)

Native Son

“Pretty soon you get so you can’t hope for nothing. You just keep movingall the time, doing what other folks say. You ain’t a man no more. You justwork day in and day out so the world can roll on and other folks can live.

Native Son

“For the first time in his life a white man had become a human being tohim…” (289)

Native Son

“For the firsttime in his life he could stand and see vague relations that he had neverdreamed of” (360-361)

Native Son

“He would not mind dying now if he could only find out whatthis meant, what he was in relation to all the others that lived…” (363)

Native Son

“Yet he saw andfelt but only one life, and that one life was more than a sleep, a dream; lifewas all life had.” (361)

Native Son

“The complex forces of society have isolated here for us asymbol, a test symbol. The prejudices of men have stained this symbol, like agerm stained for examination under a microscope. The unremitting hate of menhas given us a psychological distance that will enable us to see this tinysocial symbol in relation to our whole social organism.” (381-2)

Native Son

“How can I…make a picture of what happened to thisboy show plain and powerful upon a screen of sober reason, when a thousandnewspaper and magazine artists have already drawn it in lurid ink upon a millionsheets of public print?” (384)

Native Son

“That mob did not come here of its own accord! It was incited!...Who…fannedthis latent late into fury? (386)

Native Son

“If only ten or twenty Negroes had been put into slavery, we could callit injustice, but there were hundreds of thousands of them throughout thecountry…Injustice which lasts for three centuries and which exists amongmillions of people over thousands of square miles of territory, is injustice nolonger; it is an accomplished fact of life….

Native Son

“We must deal here with a dislocation of lifeinvolving millions of people, a dislocation so vast as to stagger theimagination” (387).

Native Son

“Rather I plead with you to see a mode of life in ourmidst, a mode of life stunted and distorted…” ( 388)

Native Son

“He comes of a people who have lived under queer conditionsof life, conditions thrust outside the normal circle of civilization. Buteven in living outside of our lives, he has not had a full life of his own…Wemarked up the earth and said ‘Stay there!’ But life is not stationary.” (394)

Native Son

“But the corpse returns and raids our homes!... The corpse is not dead!”(392)

Native Son

“This is a case of a man’s mistaking a whole race of men aspart of the natural structure of the universe and of his acting toward themaccordingly…he must defend himself, or adapt himself to, the total naturalworld in which he lives” (396)

Native Son

“You rent houses to Negroes in the Black Belt and refuse torent to them elsewhere.” (393)

Native Son

“Consider the mere physical aspects of our civilization. Howalluring, how dazzling it is!...Imagine a man walking amid such a scene, andknowing it is not for him!” (394)

Native Son

“Every school teacher knows the limits which have beenplaced on Negro education” (394)

Native Son

“the only Negroes I know of who consistently violated theJim Crow laws of the South” (397)

Native Son

“I don’t mean to say that environment makesconsciousness (I suppose God makes that, if there is a God) but I do say thatenvironment supplies the instrumentalities through which the organism expressesitself, and if that environment is warped and tranquil, the mode and manner ofbehavior will be affected towards deadlocking tensions or orderly fulfillment.”(442)

Native Son

“What Bigger meant had claimed me because I felt with all mybeing that he was more important than what any person, white or black, wouldtry to make of him, more important than political analysis designed to explainor deny him, more important even than my own sense of fear, shame, anddiffidence…he had in him many levels of life.”

Native Son

“Broken asunder, yet made in the same mould, could it bethat each completed what was dormant in the other? She might have been—allthat; and he—But now. Between them lay the widest gulf that can separate onebeing from another. She spoke. He was dumb. She was a woman; he was a dog. Thusclosely united, this intensely divided, they gazed at each other.” (23)

Virginia Woolf, Flush

“he enjoyed…most of the pleasures and some of the licensesnatural to his youth and sex” (11)

Flush

“…in a woman noexcuse could have availed; her name must have been blotted in ignominy from thepage. But the moral code of dogs…is certainly different than ours…nothing inFlush’s conduct…unfitted him for the society of the purist and the chastest inthe land then…” (13)

Flush

“Door after door shut in his face as Miss Mitford wentdownstairs; they shut on freedom; on hares, on grass; on his adored, hisvenerated mistress…” (22)

Flush

“Were these not the signals of freedom?” (30)

Flush

“He gladly accepted the protection of the chain.” (30)

Flush

“Where there are flower-beds and asphalt paths, there aremen in shiny top-hats; where there are flower bets and asphalt paths and men inshiny top-hats, dogs must be lead on chains.” (30)

Flush

“Dogs are not equal, but different” (31)

Flush

“He noted with the approval of the purple jar from which hedrank—such are the privileges of rank; he bent his head quietly to have thechain fixed to his collar—such are its penalties.” (32)

Flush

“…when Mrs. Barrett called him back, when she laid her handon his collar, he could not deny that another feeling, urgent, contradictory,disagreeable—he did not know what to call it or why he obeyed it, restrainedhim. He lay still at her feet. To resign, to control, to suppress the mostviolent instincts of his nature—that was the prime lesson of the bedroomschool” (34-5)

Flush

“Between them, Flush felt more and more strongly, as theweeks wore on, was a bond, an uncomfortable yet thrilling tightness; so that ifhis pleasure was her pain, then his pleasure was pleasure no longer but threeparts pain” (35)

Flush

“She could notgo out. She was chained to the sofa. ‘A bird in a cage would have as good astory,’ she wrote, as she had. And Flush, to whom the whole world was free,chose to forfeit all the smells of Wimpole Street in order to lie by her side.”(35)

Flush

“And yet sometimes the tie would almost break; there werevast gaps in her understanding….”

Flush

“Yet, he argued, what was there to be afraid of, as long as theirwas no change in Miss Barrett’s life? And there was no change…(52)

Flush

“Looking up at her from under his eyebrows as she lay,severe and silent on the sofa, he knew that he must love her forever. Butthings are not that simple but complex. If he bit Mr. Browning he bit her too.Hatred is not hatred; hatred is also love…Mr. Browning was Miss Barrettt—MissBarrett was Mr. Browning; love is hatred and hatred is love….” (70)

Flush

“But if we are led to assume that the Spaniels followed human example,and looked up to Greyhounds as their superiors and considered Hounds beneaththem, we have to admit that their aristocracy was founded on better reasonsthan ours …

Flush

“But when we ask what constitutes noble birth—should oureyes be light or dark, our ears curled or straight, our topnots fatal, ourjudges merely refer us to our coats of arms. You have no perhaps. Then you arenobody…” (97)

Flush

“he chose to spell his name with a t, and thus claimeddescent from the Northumberland family of the Mitfords of Bertram Castle…

Flush

“a dog of high repute and value…when we remember what thepound could buy in the year A.D. 948—how many wives, slaves, horses, oxen,turkeys, and geese…” (5)

Flush

“But to sell Flush was unthinkable. He was of the rarerorder of objects that cannot be associated with money. Was he not of that stillrarer kind that, because they typify what is spiritual, what is beyond price,become a fitting token of the disinterestedness of friendship; may be offeredin that spirit to a friend…Yes, Flush was worthy of Miss Barrett; Miss Barrettwas worthy of Flush.” (15)

Flush

“if you were not an invalid…you might see sights and hearlanguage and smell smells, not a stone’s throw from Wimpole Street, that threwdoubts upon the solidity of Wimpole Street itself” (78)

“floors were rotten, the walls dripped with filth; hordes ofhalf-naked men and women had taken up their lodging in old banqueting halls…”(79)

Flush

“InWhitechapel, poverty and vice and misery had breed and seethed and propagatedtheir kind for centuries without interference…” (80)

Flush

“Aptly enough, where the poor conglomerated thus, thesettlement was called a Rookery. For there human beings swarmed on top of eachother as rooks swarm and blacken tree tops…” (80)

Flush

“The police could do nothing. No single wayfarer could doanything except hurry through as fast as he could and perhaps drop a hint….thatall was not quite as it should be. Cholera would come, and perhaps the hintthat cholera would give would not be quite so evasive.” (80-81)

Flush

“the only safecourse for those who lived in Wimpole street and its neighborhood was to keepstrictly within the respectable area and to lead your dog on a chain.” (81)

“Wimpole Street was determined to make a stand againstWhitechapel…[Barrett’s] father and brother were in league against her and werecapable of any treachery in the interests of their class. But worst of all—farworse—Mr. Browning himself threw all his weight, all his eloquence, all hislearning, all his logic, on the side of Wimpole Street and against Flush.

Flush

“How easy it would have been to sink back on her pillows andsigh, “I am a weak woman; I know nothing of law and justice; decide for me”(92)

Flush

“Mrs. Barrett took up her pen and refuted RobertBrowning…she was siding against RB, and in favor of fathers, brothers, anddomineers in general” (93)

Flush

“But Flush…have I a right to sacrifice him in hisinnocence?” (93)

Flush

“This, then, was what lay on the other side of WimpoleStreet—these faces, these houses” (96)

Flush

“In truth, the forces of Wimpole Street were still,even at this last moment, battling to keep Flush and Miss Barrett apart” (98)

Flush

“Here lived women like herself; while she lay on her sofa,reading, writing, they lived thus.” (96)

Flush

“The old godsof the bedroom—the bookcase, the wardrobe, the busts—seemed to have lost theirsubstance. The room was no longer the whole world; it was only a shelter…”(101)

Flush

“To be nothing. Is that not, after all, the mostsatisfactory state in the world?” (135)

Flush

“But here in Pisa, though dogs abounded, there were noranks; all—could it be possible?”—were mongrels. As far as he could see, theywere dogs merely…Had the Kennel Club, then, no jurisdiction in Italy?” (112)

Flush

“Where where chains now? Where were park-keepers and truncheons?...[Flush]was the friend of all the world now. All dogs were his brothers. He had no needof a chain in this new world; he had no need of protection” (117)

Flush

“Now Flush knewwhat men can never know—love pure, love simple, love entire; love that bringsno train of care in its wake; that has no shame, no remorse; that is here, thatis gone, as the bee on the flower is here and gone” (119)

Flush

“But here in Pisa, though dogs abounded, there were noranks; all—could it be possible?”—were mongrels. As far as he could see, theywere dogs merely…Had the Kennel Club, then, no jurisdiction in Italy?” (112)

Flush

“Where where chains now? Where were park-keepers andtruncheons?...[Flush] was the friend of all the world now. All dogs were hisbrothers. He had no need of a chain in this new world; he had no need ofprotection” (117)

Flush

“the number ofher children, whether she had money of her own, if she had a room to herself,whether she had help in bringing up her family, if she had servants…”

Virginia Woolf, "Women and Fiction"

nineteenth-centurynovels written by “women from who was forcibly withheld all experience savethat which could be met with in a middle-class drawing room”

virginia woolf, women and fiction

“As men are the arbiters of that convention, as they have established anorder of values in life, so too, since fiction is largely based on life, thesevalues will prevail there also…when a woman comes to write a novel, she willfind that she is perpetually trying to alter the established values— to makeserious what appears trivial to a man, and trivial what to him is important.”

Virginia Woolf, Women and Fiction

“Their men and women will not be observed wholly in relationto each other emotionally, but as they cohere and class in groups, classes, andraces”

“The greatest poets in the world have smelt nothing but roses on the onehand, and dung on the other. The infinite gradations that lie between areunrecorded. Yet it was in the world of smell that Flush mostly lived…Todescribe his simplest experience with the daily chop or biscuit is beyond ourpower.” (130)

Flush

“And yet sometimes the tie wouldalmost break; there were vast gaps in her understanding….” (36-38)

Flush

“Thus many people in the early ‘fifties became possessed ofballs…there can be no doubt that the spirits began to show signs ofrecklessness, and, escaping in vast numbers, took up their residence in tables”(150-151)

Flush

“Why should there not be anotherworld only a half a moment’s flight from Florence—a better world, a morebeautiful world, where the dead live, trying in vain to reach us? At any rateshe would take the risk.” (152)

Flush

“You know I am rather a visionaryand inclined to knock round at all the doors of the present world to try to getout….” (153)

Flush

“Flush could hear and see nothing.True, the table was standing on one leg, but so tables will if you lean hard onone side.” (153-54)

Flush

“As the weeks passed, thispreoccupation with the invisible grew upon her” (154)

Flush

“But far worse than any smell toFlush, far worse than any antics, was the look on Mrs. Browning’s face when shegazed out of the window as if she were seeing something that was wonderful whenthere was nothing. Flush stood himself in front of her. She looked through himas if he were not there….as if he were invisible.” (155-6)

Flush

“But she was woman; he was dog.Mrs. Browning went on reading. Then she looked at Flush again. But he did notlook at her. An extraordinary change had come over him. ‘Flush!’, she cried.But he was silent. He had been alive; he was now dead. That was all. Thedrawing room table, strangely enough, stayed perfectly still.” (161)

Flush

“It is nearly five years since Iwas an ape, a short space of time, perhaps, according to the calendar, but aninfinitely long time to gallop through at full speed, as I have done…” (250)

Franz Khafka, Report to an Academy

“…your life as apes, gentlemen,insofar as something of that kind lies behind you, cannot be farther removedfrom you than mine is from me. Yet everyone on earth feels a tickling at theheels; the small chimpanzee and the great Achilles alike.” (250)

Kahfka, Report to an Academy

“The first thing I learned was togive a handshake” (251); “if a visitor arrives, I receive him with propriety”(258)

Khafka, Report to an Academy

“…by the way, I have drunk many abottle of good red wine since then with the leader of that expedition…” (251)

Kafka, Report to an Academy

“The second shot hit me below the hip. It was a severe wound,it is the cause of my limping a little to this day…you would find nothing but awell-groomed fur and the scar made—let me be particular in the choice of wordfor this particular purpose, to avoid misunderstanding—the scar made by awanton shot” (251-252)

Kafka, Report to an Academy

“Such a method of confining wild beasts is supposed to haveits advantages during the first days of captivity, and out of my own experienceI cannot deny that from the human point of view this is really thecase.” (252)

Kafka, Report to an Academy

“a horrible name, utterlyinappropriate, which only some ape could have thought of” (251)

Kafka, Report to an Academy

“So I had to squat with my knees bent and trembling all thetime…and my face was turned toward the locker while the bars of the cage cutinto my flesh from behind” (252).

Kafka, Report to an Academy

“they had a habit of doing everything as slowly as possible”;“their laughter had always a gruff bark in it…They always had something intheir mouths to spit out…they hardly spoke but only grunted to each other”(254)

Kafka, Report to an Academy

“I had no way out but I had to deviseone, for without it I could not live…Yet as far as Hagenbeck was concerned, theplace for apes was in front of the locker—well then, I had to stop being anape.” (253)

Kafka, Report to an Academy

“I deliberately do not use theword ‘freedom.’ I do not mean the spacious feeling of freedom on all sides…Inpassing: may I say that all too often men are betrayed by the word freedom. Andas freedom is counted among the most sublime feelings, so the correspondingdisillusionment can be also sublime.” (253)

Kafka, Report to an Academy

“One hung by the hair from the teeth of the other. “And that too ishuman freedom,” I thought, “self-controlled movement.” What a mockery of holyMother Nature! (253)

Kafka, Report to an Academy

“It was easy to imitate thesepeople. I learned to spit in the very first days…I could sound smoke a pipe…Myworst trouble came from the schnapps bottle…I, enchanted with my gradualenlightenment, squealed and scratched myself…” (256)

Kafka, Report to an Academy

“…I called a brief andunmistakable “Hallo!” breaking into human speech, and with this outburst brokeinto the human community…there was no attraction for me in imitating humanbeings; I imitated them because I needed a way out…” (257)

Kafka, Report to an Academy

“With an effort which up until now has never been repeated I managed toreach the cultural level of an average European. In itself that might benothing to speak of, but it is something insofar as it has helped me out of mycage and opened a special way out for me, the way of humanity…” (258)

Kafka, Report to an Academy

“And so I learned things,gentlemen. Ah, one learns things when one has to; one learns at all costs. Onestands over oneself with a whip; one flays oneself at the slightest opposition.My ape nature fled out of me, head over heels and away, so that my firstteacher was almost himself turned into an ape by it…(258)

Kafka, Report to an Academy

“When I come home…there sits waiting for me a half-trainedlittle chimpanzee and I take comfort from her as apes do. By day, I cannot bearto see her; for she has the insane look of a bewildered half-broken animal inher eye…On the whole, at any rate, I have achieved what I set out to achieve.But do not tell me it was not worth the trouble.” (259)

Kafka, Report to an Academy

“Sometimes I’m overcome with suchan aversion to human beings that I can barely refrain from retching. This, ofcourse, has nothing to do with the individual human being, least of all withyour charming presence. It concerns all human beings. There’s nothingextraordinary about this.” (260)

Kafka, Report to an Academy

“Meanwhile,Betty measured windows for curtains, bought extra rugs, and happily took careof all the details that were necessary to make a new, bigger house a home.”

Highsmith, Hamsters vs. Websters

“The puppygrinned and slavered and wriggled in his loose hound’s skin, which was soready to fill out with the aid of Puppy-Spruce, Grow-Pup, dog-bone shapedbiscuits and vitamins, all of which Julian bought at the shop.”

Highsmith, Hamsters vs. Websters

“They couldlive in the little rooms we’ve got...’All that space should be filleda little bit!,’ said Betty. She was a happy as Larry with the days purchases”(183)

Highsmith, Hamsters vs. Websters

“Julian came home at 4:30, and Larry dragged him out to show him thelittle ones. ‘That’s awfully quick. Isn’t it?’, said Julian…Julian’s mind justthen was on a swimming pool, and he strolled out with his briefcase still underhis arm to take another look at his lawn. Larry followed him, thinking that thelawn would offer an ample burrowing space for his hamsters and their offspringwhen winter rolled around

Highsmith, Hamsters vs. Websters

“Larry, in his big room all his own, browed in the EncyclopaediaBritannica on the subject of hamsters…” (183)

Highsmith, Hamsters vs. Websters

“A thought of selling them to crossed his mind, and just asquickly vanished. It was more pleasant to dream about a dozen tiny hamsterscovering the floor of the three-foot by three-foot warren where his two werenow. Probably they would fill all the six warrens before hibernation time.”(184)

Highsmith, Hamsters vs. Websters

“I said I had room. And—well, you know I’m good at takingcare of them.”

“That you are.—All right, Larry, this once. Butwe don’t want too many, do we? All these are going to produce more, you know.”

Highsmith, Hamsters vs. Websters

Larry nodded politely. His thoughts swam. His status hadrisen at school because he could take on hamsters and knew a lot about them,and on his own property he had the warrens the hamsters needed, not some oldcrate or cardboard box. (186)

Highsmith, Hamsters vs. Websters

“Larry was tempted to demand twenty-five cents for every hamster he tookon from his school chums…but he resisted. Larry in his fantasy imagined himselfthe protector of hamsters, the friend who gave them a happier life than the onethey had known before, when they lived in cramped boxes

Highsmith, Hamsters vs. Websters

“All was bliss, until the swimming pool men arrive in the last week ofJuly” (189)

Highsmith, Hamsters vs. Websters

“The bulldozer was already humming, groaning, stabbing atthe lawn. Larry was more worried about his hamster burrows than about hisfather.” (190)

Highsmith, Hamsters vs. Websters

“Larry—Larry, you take the cake for destroying property. Yourown property!”

Highsmith, Hamsters vs. Websters

“He wanted to fight his father with his fists. If he’d onlybeen able to tackle his father man to man in a fight, he wouldn’t be about tocry now, like a coward...Larry didn’t believe a word of it [his mother’sassurances]. ‘And what about the little ones? All underneath? Without theirparents?’ (194)

Highsmith, Hamsters vs. Websters

“And he realized he didn’t care. He didn’t care whathappened to his father! It was a little like watching something on a TV screen.Yes, he did care. He wanted the hamsters to win. He wanted his father toget defeated, to lose…The hamsters had a right to protect their land, theirhomes, a right to protect their offspring” (199)

Highsmith, Hamsters vs. Websters

“So, his father was dead, Larry realized, finally. Dead because ofhamsters which had bitten him. But in a way hadn’t his fathers asked for it?...Muchas Larry loved his father, and knew he should love his father—who had been apretty good father as fathers went—Larry was still somehow on the side of thehamsters

Highsmith, Hamsters vs. Websters

“And when the young were only three weeks old, they werethrust from the parental burrow to fend for themselves” (184)

Highsmith, Hamsters vs. Websters

“My God, what did he want? He certainly wasn’t a pervert,Tom thought for a second time, though now his tortured brain groped andproduced the actual word…” (10)

“Tom had not wanted him to see where he lived…Tom had beenshocked at the sordidness of the place, shocked that he even knew anybody likethat” (16)

Ripley

“My parents died when I was very small. I was raised bymy aunt in Boston” (25)

ripley

“Tom glanced behind him and saw the man coming out of theGreen Cage, heading his way…Tom had noticed him five minutes ago, eyeing himcarefully from a table, as if he wasn’t quite sure, but almost.” (9)

ripley

“If there was any sensation he hated, it was that of beingfollowed, by anybody. And lately he had it all the time.” (17)

ripley

“There were very few things that got under his skin…but thiswas one of them: noisy surprises like this, the riffraff, the vulgarians, the slobshe thought he had left behind when he crossed the gangplank, littering the verystateroom where he was to spend the next five days!…It was awful. It went on,the noise and the laughter and the girls feeling the bed and looking in thejohn.” (34)

ripley

“Sissy, he’s a sissy from the ground up! Just like hisfather!”

ripley

“He was starting a new life. Good-bye to all the second-ratepeople he had hung around and let hang on him the past three years in New York.He felt as he imagined immigrants felt when they left everything behind them insome foreign country, left their friends and relations and their past mistakes,and sailed for America. A clean slate!” (37-8)

ripley

“They had often slept together on big bear rugs in front ofthe fireplace, and it was another of the wonderful things about him that shenever wanted or expected him to make a pass at her, and he never had…Shesqueezed his shoulder, the only physical touch he could recall her ever havinggiven him” (32-33)

ripley

“I’d like to see Tom caught with a girl in his room!’, EdMartin said, laughing.” (35)

ripley

“I’m not queer.I don’t know if you have the idea that I am or not…” (79)

ripley

“All right, hemay not be queer. He’s just nothing, which is worse. He isn’t normal enough tohave any kind of sex life, if you know what I mean.” (118)

ripley

“Tom had an ecstatic moment when he thought of all thepleasures that lay before him now with Dickie’s money, other beds, tables,seas, ships, suitcases, shirts, years of freedom, years of pleasure…” (108)

ripley

“This was theclean slate he had thought about on the boat…This was the real annihilation ofthe past and of himself. Tom Ripley, who was made up of that past, and hisrebirth as a completely different person” (122-3)

ripley

“Fascinating, some of them.’ Tom had never seen them, but hecould see them now, precise draughtsman’s drawings with every line and bolt andscrew labeled, could see Dickie smiling…and he could have gone on for severalminutes describing details for Mr. Greenleaf’s delight…” (14)

ripley

“…he amusedhimself by adding an imaginary postdated paragraph about finding Dickie andliving with him in his Mongibello house…and he got so carried away that it wenton for eight pages and he knew we would never mail it, so he wrote on…” (39)

ripley

“He remembered…the violent scenes he had imagined—AuntDottie trying to hold him to the house and he hitting her with his fists…andfinally tearing the brooch off her dress and stabbing her a million times inthe throat with it.” (42)

ripley

“Tom envied him with a heartbreaking surge of envy and ofself-pity” (54)

ripley

“He felt sorry that Dickie fell into this category asa painter, because he wanted Dickie to be so much more” (60)

ripley

“He had heard it before. He was waiting for something profoundand original from Dickie” (65)

ripley

“The sat slumped in the carrozza, each with a sandaled footpropped on one knee, and it seemed to Tom that he was looking in a mirror whenhe looked at Dickie’s leg and his propped food beside him. They were the sameheight. And very much the same weight” (67)

ripley

“He wanted to kill Dickie…he could become Dickie…” (97)

ripley

“Marge’s house was a rather sloppy looking one-storey affairwith a messy garden at one end, a couple of buckets and a garden hosecluttering the path to the door…a disorderly table with a typewriter on it”(57-8)

ripley

“There was no sign of Marge anywhere. Least of all in Dickie’sbedroom” (61)

ripley

“She had the look of a mother or an older sister now—the oldfeminine disapproval of the destructive play of little boys and men…” (70)

ripley

“…her speech, Tom thought, was abominable…” (70)

ripley

“He suddenly felt Dickie was embracing her, or at leasttouching her, at this minute, and partly he wanted to see it, and partly heloathed the idea of seeing it…What disgusted him was the big bulge of herbehind in the peasant skirt below Dickie’s arm that circled her waist. AndDickie—! Tom really wouldn’t have believed it possible of Dickie! (76)

ripley

“the eyes were themselves shining and empty…meaningless,without relation to him…in Dickie’s eyes Tom saw nothing more now than he wouldhave seen if he had looked at the heart, bloodless surface of a mirror…and hewould know time and time again that he would never know them” (77-78)

ripley

“A wall of white spray rose up on Tom’s left, then graduallyfell to show the empty horizon. They were streaking across the empty wateragain, toward nothing. Dickie was trying the speed, smiling, his blue eyessmiling at the emptiness.” (100)

ripley

“All right, he may not be queer. He’s just a nothing, whichis worse.” (118)

ripley

“It was a letter in the absentminded and faintly lugubrioustone of all Dickie’s letters, a letter that could not be called warm or unwarm,and that said essentially nothing.” (138)

ripley

“I can’t imagine Dickie without his rings,” Marge said toMcCarron

ripley

“He was sorry that Dickie fell into this category as apainter, because he wanted Dickie to be so much more.” (60)

ripley

“He felt alone, yet not at all lonely. It was very much like the feelingon Christmas Eve in Paris, a feeling that everyone was watching him, as ifhe had an audience made up of the entire world, a feeling that kept him onhis mettle, because to make a mistake would be catastrophic. Yet he feltabsolutely confident that he would not make a mistake. It gave his existencea peculiar, delicious atmosphere of purity pg.132

ripley

“The atmosphere of the city became stranger as the day wenton. If was as if something had gone out of New York—the realness or theimportance of it—and the city was putting on a show just for him, a colossalshow with its buses and hurrying people….As if when his boat left the pier onSaturday the whole city of New York would collapse with a poof like alot of cardboard on the stage.” (29)

ripley

“Slowly he took off his jacket and untied his tie, watchingevery move he made as if it were somebody else’s movements he were watching.Astonishing how much straighter he was standing now…” (17)

ripley

“He saw himself as if he were standing apart from himselfand watching the scene. He corrected even his stance, and made it seem morerelaxed by resting a hand on the end post of the bed.” (162)

ripley

“Tom had been very friendly last summer with a Princetonjunior who had talked of nothing but Princeton, so that Tom had pumped him formore and more, foreseeing a time when he might be able to use the information”(23)

ripley

“In a large mirror on the wall he could see himself: theupright, self-respecting young man again…He was doing the right thing, behavingthe right way” (25)

ripley

“’It’s justlike out of Shakespeare or something!’ That was just what Tom thought, too”(31)

“He began to play a role on the ship, that of a seriousyoung man with a serious job ahead of him.” (37)

ripley

“A cap was the most versatile of headgears, he thought…Hecould look like a country gentleman, a thug, an Englishman, a Frenchman, or aplan American eccentric, depending on how he wore it…He was versatile,and the world was wide! He swore to himself he would stick to a job once he gotit. Patience and perseverance!. Upward and onward!” (37)

ripley

“He had come to New York with such high aspirations. He hadwanted to be an actor…” (39)

ripley

“It gave him the opportunity to concentrate on being DickieGreenleaf. He broke his bread as Dickie did, thrust his fork into his mouthwith his left hand as Dickie did…(129)”

ripley

“Tom thought that his Italian was on par with Dickie’s. Heremembered verbatim several sentences that Dickie had said at one time oranother which he now knew were incorrect….Dickie never used the subjunctive asoften as it should be used in Italian. Tom studiously kept himself fromlearning the proper uses of subjunctive.” (130-131)

ripley

“Tom Ripley had never been despondent, anyway, even as TomRipley, though he had often looked it. Hadn’t he learned something from theselast months? If you wanted to be cheerful, or melancholic, or wistful, orthoughtful, or courteous, you simply had to act those things with everygesture.” (182)

ripley

“He was not afraid, but he felt that identifying himself asThomas Phelps Ripley was going to be one of the saddest things he had ever donein his life….It had been a very boring little scene.” (189-190)

ripley

“But the point of his messy house was that the messinesssubstantiated merely for his own benefit the story that he was going to tell,and that therefore he had to believe himself.” (139)

ripley

“Tom tried to reason himself out of a hangover, because hehad had only the equivalent of three martinis and three Pernods at most. Heknew it was a matter of mental suggestion, and that he had a hangover becausehe had intended to pretend that he had been drinking with Freddie. And now whenthere was no need of it, he was pretending uncontrollably.” (146)

ripley

“He wanted to go straight to Venice, but he thought he should spend onenight doing what he intended to tell the police he had been doing for severalmonths: sleeping in his car on a country road. He spent one night in thebackseat of the Lancia, cramped and miserable pp. 184

ripley

“His stories were good because he imagined them intensely;so intensely that he came to believe them.’ (239)

ripley

“But what had he said about risks? Risks were what made thewhole thing fun…” (171)

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“In a way, itwas asking for trouble…But that was the mood he was in…The very chanciness oftrying for all of Dickie’s money, the peril of it, was irresistible to him. Hewas so bored after the dreary, eventless weeks in Venice, when each day thatwent by seemed to confirm his personal safety and emphasize the dullness ofexistence.” (261)

ripley

“He couldn’t use the Rome American Express as Tom Ripley,but he had to keep Tom Ripley with him, his passport and his clothes in orderfor emergencies like Marge’s telephone call this morning” (165).

ripley

“He might play up Tom a little more, he thought. He couldstoop a little more, he could be shyer than ever, he could even wearhorn-rimmed glasses and hold his mouth in an even sadder, droopier manner tocontrast with Dickie’s tenseness” (187)

ripley

“He would have to keep a distance from people, always. Hemight acquire the different standards and habits, but he could never acquirethe circle of friends—not unless he went to Istanbul or Ceylon, and what wasthe use of acquiring the kind of people he would meet in those place? He wasalone, and it was a lonely game he was playing.” (176)

ripley

“He loved possessions, not masses of them, but a select fewthat he did not part with. They gave a man self-respect. Not ostentation butquality, and the love that cherished the quality. Possessions reminded him thathe existed, and made him enjoy his existence. It was as simple as that. Andwasn’t that worth something? He existed.” (235)

ripley

“I have been using the term ‘performance’ to refer to all of theactivity of the individual which occurs during a period marked by thecontinuous presence before a particular set of observers and which hassome influence on the observers. It will be convenient to label as ‘front’ thatpart of the individuals performance which regularly functions in a general andfixed fashion to define the situation for those who observe the performance.